Abstract
To determine the meaning(s) of the concepts “Republican,” “Democrat,” and “Independent,” the most frequently cited attributes of each party label were scaled in terms of their semantic centrality. An analysis of the magnitude scale values demonstrates that the labels “Republican” and “Democrat” have unique cognitive properties which easily discriminate one label from another. The most characteristic and discriminating properties refer to (1) voting, (2) electioneering, and (3) other forms of electoral behavior. Although these two labels have many strong properties over which there is considerable agreement, such consensus is lacking for the fewer and weaker properties which characterize and discriminate the label “Independent.” Whereas “Republican” and “Democrat” are sharply delineated, semantic inversions of one another, the concept “Independent” is ambiguously defined and only weakly distinguishable from other concepts.
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